Jutta Haeckel: Whiteout

Dusseldorf-based Jutta Haeckel has developed a style of painting that, while technically related to printmaking, is unique. Perhaps more impressively, her signature technique and the concepts she explores with it are inseparable.

Haeckel’s brushstrokes do not define objects but instead describe the space between them. Essentially, she makes representational paintings by representing void.

Her subject matter — landscape — is developed through interwoven pattern. Fencing, steel structures, graffiti and branches are layered, creating a flat, net-like surface that both screens and reveals the three-dimensional space of the image. In a more complex version of the way printmakers work, marks that appear to be in the foreground of the image are actually the ground of the painting. From swirling patterns in jewel-toned hues emerge scenes of industrial decay — razor wire and nature reclaiming urban architecture. Things that appear solid are nonexistent.

These paintings challenge a viewer’s perceptions. The ambiguities are as multi-layered as Haeckel’s painting technique — representation vs. abstraction, presence vs. absence, the mundane vs. the incomprehensible, fact vs. faith.